“Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.”
“Another said , I don t ask six months, I don t ask two. In less than two weeks we ll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.”
“At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834, found him standing not far from his bed, with cartridges in his hands, caught in the act.”
“All this ferment was public, we might almost say tranquil. The imminent insurrection gathered its storm calmly in the face of the government. No singularity was lacking in this crisis, still subterranean, but already perceptible. The middle class talked quietly with workingmen about the preparations. They would say, How is the uprising coming along? in the same tone in which they would have said, How s your wife?”
“In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.”
“The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it s gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.”
“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”
“...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.”
“Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.”
“It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.”
“History respects revolutions; and yet, if a revolution is progressive, support it; if it is reactionary, resist it!”
“If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I d have to say he can t do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.”
“So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we re overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We ve gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?”
“The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.”
“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].”
“Revolution must take place within one s own mind.”
“Ok I m not so smart I m working class. But it s the working class that keeps the world running and it s the working class that get exploited. What kind revolution is it that just throws out big words that working class people can t understand. Revolution or not the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholes I m not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I m going to believe in. -- Midori”